Top 5 Retro Games for iPhone

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Get your yesteryear fix right here.

By Levi Buchanan

Sorting through the zillions of apps on the App Store to find the best downloads for your iPhone or iPod Touch is time consuming and fraught with the risk of dropping good money on a bad purchase. Even though most apps cost just a few dollars or Euros, that still was your hard-earned coin. So to help you make the best download decisions, IGN has started a series of Top 5s for various genres and categories in the App Store. If you're new to the App Store, we hope to make the discovery of new apps and games more fun. Alternatively, if you've had an iPhone for years, perhaps you'll find something new. That's what makes the App Store such an exciting place: there's always something new behind each click.

The games of yesteryear never go out of style. Well, the good ones don't, at least. Thankfully, the App Store has become a prime destination for retroheads seeking a fix of old-school games. There are hundreds of retro games (and neo-retro games – but we'll feature those in another article) you can download to your iPhone and iPad. Reliving your childhood – or discovering somebody else's – is easier than ever. And these five games are where you should start. The emphasis is on "start," though. Because once you start down this rabbit hole, you may find it impossible to stop digging.

Laserdisc games were the last big pop of the arcades before the long, sad twilight period. The laser craze was dominated by interactive cartoons, where you feverishly followed commands to keep the action going. The biggest star of this era was Dragon's Lair, by Don Bluth. Dirk the Daring's quest was a huge hit, drawing monster crowds around cabinets. Bluth followed it up with the less-popular but superior Space Ace. Now, instead of playing through a series of vignettes, you controlled an actual narrative. Dexter must save Kimmy from the boorish alien Borf. It's a great yarn, complemented by excellent animation. Download 'em both for your iPhone… and while you're at it, check out Cobra Command, too, another great example of the laser craze.

If you were in junior high in the eighties, chances are good your school had at least one or two computers – maybe an Apple IIe or a Commodore 64. Chances are even better you played Oregon Trail on it. The original edutainment (later usurped by Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?), Oregon Trail taught you about the hard slog to the Willamette Valley endured by pioneers. Those lessons were tucked between addictive resource management and threats of misfortune. Gameloft's Oregon Trail refresh keeps everything we loved about the classic – "you have died of dysentery" – but streamlined it for the iPhone and given it an incredible paint job. For just a buck, you owe it to yourself to give it a go.

The Commodore 64 was the Trojan Horse of the Reagan Era. Your parents bought it because they saw a commercials starring spreadsheets and word processing. You, on the other hand, knew what it was really good for: gaming. This C64 emulator for the iPhone is extremely well done. It comes with a handful of free games, but you can also purchase additional titles within the app such as Boulder Dash, Paradroid (awesome music), and Space Taxi. Manomio is updating the catalog all the time with classics. Hopefully, Electronic Arts will start to sell some of their yesteryear masterpieces such as Mail Order Monsters and M.U.L.E. through this app, too.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Lucasarts was synonymous with adventure gaming. Point-and-click epics were Lucasarts' bread and butter and no franchise was bigger than Monkey Island. Unlikely pirate hero Guybrush Threepwood stars in this fantastic sequel, which is loaded with puzzles of escalating difficulty. Plus, it's funny as all get-out. The iPhone interface is really easy to use, and you can hot swap between the original pixels and all-new hand-drawn art. Monkey Island II is a tad expensive, but it's worth every penny. Download it and relive the glory days of the adventure genre. (Now give us Full Throttle…)

Yeah, yeah – Wolfenstein is the original first-person shooter. But which shooter does everybody talk about? Doom. This horror shooter – the scapegoat of society's ills – sets you loose in a sci-fi hellscape, battling demons that have crossed over to our side. Now, your skepticism of how the mouse-and-keyboard combo transfers to the button-less iPhone is completely warranted. But id has put together a host of control options that work quite well, including virtual pads. If you want to see the game that permanently changed PC gaming, start here.

Really, though, there's no reason to stop at these five. There are many more excellent retro games for your iPhone, including SEGA's Shining Force RPG originally for the Genesis, Prince of Persia Retro, and Karate Champ. Square fans have embraced Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II. Oh, and Myst is also exceptional.